What Can an Inventory of Blessings Do for You?

When I was involved in the NASCAR business, we took an inventory at the end of every year. It was a tedious task, but it had to be done. We needed to match what we actually had against what we thought we had, primarily for tax purposes. That information was also helpful in planning.

If we had too much of a particular item, like a baseball hat, we put it on sale and noted to ourselves not to order so many the next time. If we were low on a popular item, seeing it alerted us to order more immediately and to monitor our supply more closely. Of course, our accounting software contained all of this information, but seeing and counting the product made it more real.

We should do the same thing with the blessings in our lives, particularly at the end of each year. Like I did with my retail business back in North Carolina, I have a general sense of my blessings, but they become more real when I think about and count them. They become even more real when I create a list.

Creating lists doesn’t come naturally to me. My wife, on the other hand, is the master of the to-do list, and will create a list containing tasks that she has already completed, just so she can get the satisfaction of crossing them off the list. It makes her incredibly efficient and productive, even if it does often leave me shaking my head.

I’m more of an “it’s in my head” guy. Ask me to list my blessings, and I’ll fire off the first four or five pretty easily. Writing them down helps me focus on blessings that maybe aren’t as obvious, like my network of mentors. I learned the power of this exercise by reading Rhonda Byrne’s book entitled, “The Magic.” It was a follow-up book to her best-seller, “The Secret.”

“The Secret” focuses on the law of attraction, while “The Magic” focuses on the power of gratitude. Both are great books that I highly recommend. In “The Magic,” Byrne asks readers to build lists of the things for which they are thankful. I often groan and dismiss exercises like this. I’m already a very thankful person, I tell myself. I don’t need to make a list to be conscious of my blessings. That’s probably more useful for people who struggle to be aware of their blessings.

I WAS WRONG!

Creating a list of blessings was difficult but rewarding work. As expected, the first four or five came easily. Those are blessings like family, health and freedom that come to the minds of most people most immediately. Once the easy ones are there, it becomes substantially more difficult. I’m embarrassed to say that I struggled to list ten blessings the first time I tried. It wasn’t that I didn’t have numerous more blessings; I just hadn’t thought of them as blessings. In other words, I wasn’t as consciously grateful as I needed to be, and the list helped me correct that.

In my NASCAR business, we always found items we didn’t know that we had when we took our year-end inventory. These often became assets that positively affected our bottom line, and we would have missed them had we not done an inventory.

The same thing happens with the blessings in our lives. Like the once-lost merchandise, hidden blessings should not remain hidden, and the best way to uncover them is to make that list.

Suggested Assignment

If at all possible, stop what you are doing right now and create a list of at least ten things for which you are grateful. Then, challenge yourself to add one item each day for the rest of the year. You will be glad that you did.

Mitch, great minds think alike. As I was listening to my daily Dynamic Catholic message today, Michael Kelly referred to this very topic….remembering and listing all of our blessings. One he spoke about today was fresh water. He mentioned how many countries and people in the world don’t even have fresh water and yet we don’t think about that at all. All we have to do is turn on the faucet! Over the next week, I’m going to do a deep dive into my blessings and WRITE them down. With that list I will find and show gratitude, which, for me, will be the first time for me really digging down and contemplating how fortunate I am….thanks for the reconfirmation. Merry Christmas!